Must naive realists be relationalists?

Relationalism maintains that perceptual experience involves, as part of its nature, a distinctive kind of conscious perceptual relation between a subject of experience and an object of experience. Together with the claim that perceptual experience is presentational, relationalism is widely believed to be a core aspect of the naive realist outlook on perception. This is a mistake. I argue that naive realism about perception can be upheld without a commitment to relationalism.     

Must overlearned lists be scanned?

Ss were presented given names as test items and asked either to indicate whether each test name was a member of a previously memorized list of names or whether each test name was the name of one of their siblings. The data indicated that the memorized hst of names was scanned in a serial fashion but that (disregarding the case where S had just one sibling) S did not have to scan the list of his own siblings’ names to decide about a test name.     

Must boxing verdicts be biased?

A model of judgment made by sports judges is outlined. Its main assumptions are as follows. (1) From the beginning a judge tries to form a hypothesis about which of the two competitors should be awarded the victory. (2) The advantages of both competitors are assessed, and these values are changed according to successive observations. (3) However, the meanings assigned to successive actions are not impartial: the greater the initial advantage of one competitor, the more his gains are enhanced and his losses de-emphasized. Both statistical analysis of judgments made at a boxing championship and in a special experiment with boxing judges revealed several regularities which seem to fit the outlined model, including a pervasive primacy effect. This effect seems to be a consequence of early preselection of the potential winner and a subsequent one-sided processing of sequentially presented information. Possible ways of avoiding partiality in boxing assessments are briefly discussed.     

Must All be Saved? A Kierkegaardian Response to Theological Universalism

In this paper, I consider how a Kierkegaardian could respond critically to the question of strong theological universalism, i.e., the belief that all individuals must eventually be reconciled to God and experience everlasting happiness. A Kierkegaardian would likely reject what Thomas Talbott has called “conservative theism,” but has the resources to mount a sustained attack on the view that all individuals must experience everlasting happiness. Some have seen that Kierkegaard has some potential in this regard, but a full Kierkegaardian response to strong theological universalism has yet to be given. In this paper, I give such an account. That God could create beings free over against himself is the cross which philosophy could not bear but upon which it has remained hanging. – Kierkegaard     

Must new worlds also be Good?

The activities analysed by Spinosa et al., viz entrepreneurship, citizen action, and cultural leadership, are all central to the American experience. They have a common phenomenological structure and a common purpose, which is to ‘disclose new worlds’, i.e. so to reconfigure the collective perceptions as to bring about ‘large‐scale cultural and historical changes’. Each, more or less unselfconsciously, is an exercise of skill, an expression of freedom, and a building of solidarity through the recovery or discovery of human meanings. I argue that unless we know the ends to which skill and freedom tend, and in which meaning is found, all three (which the authors treat rather as ends in themselves) are underdescribed, and impossible to see as possessing or conferring value simply per se. The same goes for the original three activities. Cultural leadership, citizen action, and entrepreneurship can work as easily towards bad ends as good. To see them as virtual ends in themselves, then, is premature, and a kind of formalism.     

Must realists be skeptics? An Aristotelian reply to a Darwinian Dilemma

In a series of influential essays, Sharon Street has argued, on the basis of Darwinian considerations, that normative realism leads to skepticism about moral knowledge. I argue that if we begin with the account of moral knowledge provided by Aristotelian naturalism, then we can offer a satisfactory realist response to Street’s argument, and that Aristotelian naturalism can avoid challenges facing other realist responses. I first explain Street’s evolutionary argument and three of the most prominent realist responses, and I identify challenges to each of those responses. I then develop an Aristotelian response to Street. My core claim is this: Given Aristotelian naturalism’s account of moral truth and our knowledge of it, we can accept the influence of evolutionary processes on our moral beliefs, while also providing a principled, non-question-begging reason for thinking that those basic evaluative tendencies that evolution has left us with will push us toward, rather than away from, realist moral truths, so that our reliably getting things right does not require an unexplained and implausible coincidence.     

Must the Scientific Realist be a Rationalist?

Marc Alspector-Kelly claims that Bas van Fraassen’s primary challenge to the scientific realist is for the realist to find a way to justify the use of some mode of inference that takes him from the world of observables to knowledge of the world of unobservables without thereby abandoning empiricism. It is argued that any effort to justify such an “inferential wand” must appeal either to synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori knowledge. This disjunction turns into a dilemma for the empirically-minded realist as either disjunct leads to unwanted consequences. In this paper, I split the horns of this dilemma by arguing that the realist can justify one particular such mode of inference – abduction – without committing himself to rationalism. The realist may justify this mode of inference by appealing to the analytic a priori axioms of the probability calculus. I show that Peter Lipton’s tripartite defense of abduction constitutes such a method of justification.     

Must Differences in Cognitive Value be Transparent?

Frege’s ‘differential dubitability’ test is a test for differences in cognitive value: if one can rationally believe that p while simultaneously doubting that q, then the contents p and q amount to different ‘cognitive values’. If subject S is rational, does her simultaneous adoption of different attitudes towards p and q require that the difference between p and q (as cognitive values) be transparent to her? It is natural to think so. But I argue that, if attitude anti-individualism is true, then rational differential dubitability does not presuppose that differences in cognitive value are transparent. The significance of this argument lies in what it tells us, both about the notion of cognitive value and its relation to the differential dubitability test, but also about the prospects for a Burge-type position which aims to combine attitude anti-individualism with a (qualified) reliance on the differential dubitability test.

Autonomous vs. comparative status: Must we be better than others to feel good about ourselves?

Previous research has shown that people's self-esteem and their group-oriented behavior are influenced by their judgments about the status of the groups to which they belong (pride) and assessments of their status within those groups (respect). These findings are important to justice researchers because the key antecedent of such status judgments is typically found to be the assessment of the fairness of group procedures (i.e., procedural justice). Research suggests that (1) procedural justice shapes status and that (2) status shapes self-esteem and group-oriented behavior. The paper reports the results of three studies comparing two different forms of these status judgments. The first form are autonomous judgments of pride and respect that are linked to the characteristics associated with membership in different groups. People link such judgments to inclusion or membership in the group. The second are comparative judgments of pride and respect that are linked to comparisons of one's status to the status of other people or groups. The results indicate that, within groups, people are influenced primarily by autonomous assessments of status based on their internal standards, which develop from the status associated with prototypical characteristics linked to inclusion in a group. People are less strongly influenced by comparisons of their status to the status of external comparison standards. Further, justice-based status inferences are shown to be primarily autonomous, and not comparative, in nature.     

Philosophy: what is to be done?

The isolation and professionalization of philosophy is detrimental to it. The most interesting philosophical activity is conducted at the interface of philosophy and other disciplines. Thus philosophy must continue to cross boundaries and avoid fretting about what is and is not philosophy proper.     

Must egocentric and environmental frames of reference be aligned to produce spatial S-R compatibility effects?

Four experiments were conducted to determine the effects of misaligning egocentric and environmental frames of reference on spatial S-R compatibility effects. In Experiments 1 and 3, subjects looked at two lights that were aligned horizontally, one each on either side of the body midline. They held their head upright or tilted 90 degrees to the left or right. In the upright condition the hands were uncrossed and rested opposite the lights (frames of reference aligned), whereas in the head tilt condition the hands were either crossed or uncrossed but positioned perpendicular to the lights (frames of reference not aligned). Manual choice reaction times to the lights produced spatial S-R compatibility effects that were as large when the frames of reference were aligned as when they were not. In Experiments 2 and 4, which also used upright and tilted conditions, we found generally similar results when the lights were displayed vertically and the hands disposed horizontally. The results indicate that under conditions of head rotation and with stimulus and response arrays perpendicular to each other, spatial S-R compatibility effects still occur. By taking into account both frames of reference, the subject classifies the stimuli as left or right whether they are horizontally or vertically disposed and maps them onto the responding hand, thereby producing the observed compatibility effects.     

Gender gaps: who needs to be explained?

The hypothesis that explanations for differences between prototypical and nonprototypical members of categories would focus more on attributes of the latter than on those of the former was examined. Explanations for alleged gender differences in the behavior of voters, elementary school teachers, and college professors were elicited. As predicted, explanations for gender differences within the 3 categories emphasized the qualities of the "deviant" member. Ss' explanations of alleged gender gaps in the behavior of voters and college professors focused more on qualities of women than on qualities of men. In contrast, Ss' explanations of an alleged gender gap in the behavior of elementary school teachers focused more on qualities of men than on qualities of women. The results are interpreted in terms of Kahneman and Miller's (1986) norm theory.     

How stable is common sense psychology and can it be transcended? Reply to Valsiner

Common sense is defined as the set of implications that all members of a given culture take for granted. The stability of common sense as a necessary condition for the maintenance of human relationships and societies is emphasized. Changes may and do occur. However, they can only take place in a very slow and piecemeal fashion in order to maintain intelligibility at all times. Transcendence of common sense by scientific psychology is difficult to envisage, since the phenomena studied are structured by that same common sense, and since communication about them also presupposes common sense. llanscendence through direct negation literally makes no sense.